The Mystery of Hollow Places(43)

“I’m going to a picnic and I’m bringing an apple, a barracuda, Captain Morgan, a deciduous pine, elephantiasis of the balls, a falafel truck, and . . . Gaussian frequency-shift keying.” He smiles, triumphant, little C’s punctuating the corners of his lips.

“I bet you don’t even know what that is.”

“That is not a requirement in the picnic game.” He grabs a fistful of Lucky Charms from my Baggie, which we’ve been passing back and forth, and separates out the marshmallows. Sorts them further in piles of balloons, horseshoes, rainbows. They all taste like sweet packing peanuts to me, but I like that he bothers. He dusts the cereal bits from his palm into my waiting hand, and his eyes light up. “And I do so know what Gaussian frequency-shift keying is, because we’re doing a unit of FSK modulation in my engineering elective. It uses a Gaussian filter to—”

“Fine.” I dump the cereal in my mouth and sneak a look in the rearview mirror. My dress hangs in its black plastic garment bag in the backseat, like a promise. “I’m going to a picnic and I’m bringing an apple, a barracuda, Captain Morgan, a deciduous pine, elephantiasis of the balls, a falafel truck, Gaussian frequency-shift keying, and Hannah Montana.”

Chad’s lip curls. “Of all the picnics in the world, this is the worst. You couldn’t bring Hillary Clinton?”

“Take your Captain Morgan and your elephantiasis of the balls and go, or keep playing.”

“No, let’s play a different game. Let’s play I Spy.”

“I hate that game,” I protest.

“Nobody hates I Spy.”

“I do. Oh, ‘I spy something gray.’ But it’s February in New England. It’s all gray.”

“Okay.” He tosses a marshmallow heart in the air and catches it with a click of his jaws. “What about Would You Rather?”

I know this is his way of distracting me, but better a stupid game than sitting in a silent car, cracking my knuckles until they ache and feeling more nervous by the second. “Okay. Would you rather be able to read books, or be able to read minds?”

“I can’t read books if I can read minds?”

“One or the other.”

He drums two fingers against his lips, and I remember my fixation on his mouth in his basement bedroom. “Reading minds would make it easier to be a doctor. But let’s say books. I’m pretty sure the majority of minds are boring. At least in Sugarbrook they are. Present company excluded.”

A good answer. “Would you rather . . .”

“You already had your turn, turn-taker. Now it’s mine.” He roots around in the Baggie for a last marshmallow bit and comes out empty. “Would you rather . . . be able to go to the future, or be able to visit the past?”

“Are we talking my past, or the past of humanity?”

“Your past. Not, like, Oregon-Trail-and-long-underwear past.”

“Easy. The past.” The rain’s falling a little heavier now. I watch it blacken Tillys’ driveway in inky splatters.

“Why? What if the future’s awesome?”

“With global warming? Unlikely. And I like the past. It was nice. All our problems were easier.”

It’s true. I mean, it wasn’t all lollipops and Disney movies, but the past is safe. If I could visit, I’d find all the happy parts with Dad and me and live in them over and over. And besides, I honestly don’t know what I want from my future anymore, because at this moment I have no idea what it will look like. If Tilly Donahue is the lead that helps me find my mom and dad . . . then what? I’m not wishing on a star for my biological parents to get back together, get married, book us all on a big family road trip. I know my mom’s got real problems. So I don’t believe that this time tomorrow we’ll be outfitting the guest room in Mom’s favorite color (blue, like Dad’s? Red, like mine?). I don’t know what the world will look like with all of us in it. But it has to be so much better than not knowing her.

Chad nods. “Yeah. I kind of miss my old problems too. When losing your science textbook under your bed was this huge deal. And I could tell my mom I wanted to be a doctor without having to worry about actually being a doctor, or getting into the right programs, or the right hospital, or being happy.”

“But you want to be a doctor, don’t you?”

He gives a helpless little half laugh. “I’d better.”

“Hmm. So what would you pick? The past or the future?”

When he looks at me and bites his lip, I feel my pulse in my ears, and I think this is what it feels like to really want a boy.

Whether he would’ve picked the past or the future, I’ll never find out, because a beige car pulls up the driveway of the little brown house. Tilly Donahue and her home aide, I presume. The aide slides out, waddles to the other side of the car, and gently pries the old woman out by the elbow. She guides her across the icy-slick flagstones along the front walk. All I can see of Tilly is a cloud of permed white hair above the collar of her fur coat. Who wears a fur coat to water aerobics?

Quickly they duck inside, out of the weather.

“Ready?” Chad asks.

“Yeah,” I whisper, then louder, “yes.”

When we’re shivering and blinking frozen water out of our eyes on the sidewalk, he offers me his hand. “In case I slip,” he says, and smiles.